Summary

This chapter presented generics and gave you the rationale behind the invention of generics. Additionally, it presented the Go syntax for generics as well as some issues that might come up if you use generics carelessly. It is expected that there are going to be changes to the Go standard library in order to support generics and that there is going to be a new package named slices to take advantage of the new language features.

Although a function with generics is more flexible, code with generics usually runs slower than code that works with predefined static data types. So, the price you pay for flexibility is execution speed. Similarly, Go code with generics has a bigger compilation time than equivalent code that does not use generics. Once the Go community begins working with generics in real-world scenarios, the cases where generics offer the highest productivity are going to become much more evident. At the end of the day, programming is about understanding the cost...